Good Morning China!

Tai Shan, China's most sacred peak, is the mountain everyone has to climb. Confucius climbed it 2500 years ago, and from the top proclaimed "The world is small". Throughout the dynasties, emperors climbed it to offer sacrifices to heaven. Even Chairman Mao climbed it, observing from it's peak "The East is Red". This is the mountain in China, written of in books and scriptures since time immemorial. I just had to climb it...

The first thing I do upon arriving at Tai'an (the town at the foot of Tai Shan) is get in touch with a local. By a strange coincidence, I happened to make friends with a Tai'an Local, Song, on the boat from Japan to China. And by another strange coincidence, a Japanese friend I made on the boat, Chikara, is also in town when I arrive. I am glad for the company. Smaller cities tend to have more of everything that foreigners find difficult to adjust to in China: an untraversable language barrier, crazy traffic, beggars, rampant price inflation for foreigners, warm beer, and accomodation which involves co-habiting with both small and large insects. In places like these, having someone to hold your hand is a great help.

When we met on the boat, both Song and I had been staying in Japan and spoke Japanese as a second language, but the difference in our travels was striking. While I had been traversing the nation with a pocketful of cash, she had been working in a dry cleaners for 15 hours a day, having only enough spare time to cook her meals and sleep (in a dormitory with 10 other girls). After one year of such work she receives only $10,000, which might seem a ridiculously small amount to us, but here in the countryside there are thousands who would gladly take such a job if they had the opportunity.

Song's family live in a traditional style home in a village on the outskirts of the city, which we soon travel out to see. Her whole family greet us like old friends, immediately plying us with presents and food as they show us around. Their home has no running water, just a single tap in the centre of the courtyard where all water is filled from. The toilet is a trough which is flushed by filling a bucket of water from the tap and washing the trough with it, which transfers the contents of the toilet into a garden behind the building. The neighbourhood is the perfect romantic image that every traveller in China attempts to hunt out, with dusty roads, faded and cracked concrete, and the occasionally farm animal lazily making its way through the streets.

One night Song invites me and Chikara to dinner with her byofriend's family, who will become her family in a few months when her and Li get married. Me and Chikara assume it is going to be an average dinner meal, and so are completely unprepared for what comes next.

The dishes make their appearance slowly at first. The table is enormous, and the 5 or 6 dishes placed on it look rather lonely. Then some more join them. Then some more. Soon, the entire table is covered in two layers of dishes, and the waiters are endlessly re-appearing with yet more food. This is the banquet, the ancient art of the impossible-to-eat meal.

The meal begins with a toast of Baijiu, a Chinese spirit which is like a spicier, drier and stronger version of vodka usually containing about 45% alcohol. In banquets one does not toast only once; the night is an endless procession of toasts, and the perfect filler for a pause in the conversation is to hold up your glass and shout out "Ganbei!". Luckily the Baijiu is soon replaced with good old-fashioned beer, making the endless toasts far more manageable. Again, the alcohol is provided in such amounts that even if the entire table were rampant alcoholics we could not possibly drink it all.

They endlessly entreat us to eat and drink more, and I am only too happy to oblige. The food is delicious, the beer is cold and crisp, and Li's family are the warmest company I could possibly imagine. At the end of the night, filled to the brim with delicious food, I leave completely baffled by their hospitality. What have I done to deserve such kindness? Could it be that the Chinese people, the most populous people in the world, are the nicest and most generous as well?

We sleep in the next day. For a long time. Eventually, we drag ourselves out of bed, and decide to put all that sustenance to good use - today, we will climb Tai Shan!

...It begins pleasantly...walking along a meandering path under the shade of the cypresses, taking in the scenery around us. The path is dotted with iconic stone bridges, calligraphy tablets and shrines and temples, not to mention a few jagged peaks towering over us here and there.

Chikara is endlessly amused by my popularity in China. Being Japanese, he is not instantly recognizable as a foreigner, so he can blend into the crowds when travelling. I however, look about as subtle as a polar bear in a jungle, and immediately attract attention everywhere I go. Before we have walked our first kilometre, I make friends with two university students, and we decide to walk to the top together. Companions! Yay!

Soon, the meandering path stops meandering, and I am glad for our companions. The staircases are steep and narrow, leading endlessly and relentlessly upward. Conversation is a pleasant distraction from the trials of the climb, as is China's national hobby, chewing sunflower seeds, which the girls thoughtfully brought with them. As the sun begins setting in the sky, we encounter the final challenge: no less than a true stairway to heaven, an impossibly long, impossibly steep flight of stairs traversing the last section of the path to the top. How in god's name did Confucious climb this one?!

At last we are at the top, in time to catch the last glow of dusk on the scenery below. We had planned to walk back down during the night, aided by torches, but the idea of traversing the dangerously steep staircases at night was no longer so appealing, and the girls succesfully managed to convince us to stay the night on the peak and watch the sunrise in the morning. The peak was freezing, but the ever-perceptive Chinese businessmen had noticed this and created an excellent solution; for less than a dollar, you could borrow a Mao-era Chinese Army winter jackets for the night, which were not only incredibly warm but rather fashionable too. With Lin-Lins hat, which I ended up wearing at some point during the climb, I was a dead-ringer for an American cowboy, which ensured I attracted even more attention than before.

Rebelling against the high prices of the hotels on the mountain, we do what the masses do and simply sit outside chatting and singing the night away. The full moon passes gradually overhead, casting a ghostly light over the scene of hundreds of Chinese all waiting for the new day, the better prepared ones sleeping in tents, the less prepared simply huddling together and snoozing on the stone steps as we were. By 3am the rush to grab a spot for sunrise has begun, and we abandon our sheltered steps to perch ourselves on the rocky peak. It is windy, it is cold, but at least the atmosphere around me is warm; English majors somehow gravitate toward me until I am surrounded by them, leaving poor Chikara very much lost amidst a sea of English conversation.

The mountain is packed with people shivering in the pre-dawn air, occupying ever tiny little piece of space on the sacred peak like the proverbial Chinese "Ren Shan Ren Hai" (People Mountain, People Sea). Gradually the stars in the night sky begin to disappear one by one, and slightly, ever so slightly, the sky begins to lighten. The day is about to begin.

At first, it is just a rather dull gray, gradually getting brighter and brighter. Then the colours of daybreak begin, with vivid pink splashed across the horizon. They flow across the sky, morphing in slow motion as we watch, awe-struck. I realize that the "stairway to heaven" was an excellent name for the stairs we climbed...surrounded by surreal beauty on the jagged mountain peak, it truly feels like we are in heaven now.

Suddenly, a cheer rings out across the mountain, and we look to see the first feeble rays of sun peeking through the clouds. Gradually, it rises in the sky, a flaming red ball of light in the morning sky.

By the rays of the morning sun, I see the scene laid out before me. Having reached the top at night, I never actually saw the view from the top until now. The mountain is a lot higher than I imagined; from my spot on the rocky peak, I can see what seems like all of China laid out at my feet, a maze of rivers, mountains and fields. Good morning China!

When I am done admiring the view, I notice the town of Tai'an below me, and realize; I have to walk all the way down there now!

The walk down is as painful as the walk up. The narrow, steep staircases are the death of my knees, and by the time I get down I am a complete cripple. Upon arriving in the town, Chikara and I book ourselves in for a Chinese traditional massage, with the image of a lovely relaxing experience with scented candles and soft hands skilfully taking away our aches and pains. Naturally, we could not have been more wrong.

Everything is going well when the girls walk in, petite and giggly. Then they start the massage...by hitting us on the head. Huh? Why are they hitting me? They continue in this fashion, pummelling, pounding and general pulverizing us for half an hour or so, and I realize that this is not the type of massage I had envisioned. It is kind of like getting a massage from a girlfriend you have just broken up with. They show no mercy, massaging our tender legs with brutal force, with a look in their eyes that says "You'll thank me for it later", then proceeding to stand up and walk over our backs. I cannot help but be impressed by their skill though, not to mention their physical strength as they beat us up in a very precise way according to the principles of ancient Chinese medicine.

So, I go to sleep at the bottom of Tai Shan, battered and bruised by the days experiences. But though my body may be sore, my heart is elated with the experiences of the days past. I have walked the streets of a village, drank toasts with shirtless Chinese men, heard the story of the dry-cleaning ladies of the world, and watched the wanderings of the full moon. I have climbed staircases, made friends, been beaten up by a giggly Chinese girl, and cheered the coming of day from the peak of a mountain. The aches and bruises only last so long; the memories, I am sure, will last a lifetime.